Gero Miesenböck is Waynflete Professor of Physiology and founding Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford. A native of Austria, he was on the faculty of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Yale University before coming to Oxford in 2007. Gero has received several major awards for his invention of optogenetics, including the InBev-Baillet Latour International Health Prize in 2012 and The Brain Prize in 2013.